For me it's not really to do with how much stuff is on the screen. It's more that when you're doing creative work, the intermediate state is a bunch of maybe-gr

For me it's not really to do with how much stuff is on the screen. It's more that when you're doing creative work, the intermediate state is a bunch of maybe-graphs. Maybe the bug is a->b->c, maybe the bug is caused by d + e -> c, etc. Once you find it, you know what it is and you can discard the explanations that are wrong. But before that, you have a bunch of hypotheses. Plus your mind knows that you intend to forget the details. When you're interrupted, you forget a bunch of the maybes and you have to rebuild them. This is because your evidence is not strong enough yet to have a small graph, it needs to be a big graph (or set). Main advice is to take small steps. Little pieces that are easily recoverable. Things like unit tests help to establish the facts, allowing you to push some things out of your own memory. Also take some notes to jig your memory. Sometimes you can't take small steps, because it just happens that you didn't consider something and now there's a large surface to think about. For those times, make sure you're not interrupted.